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Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

slack.engineering

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Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#231

Post by tacker2000 »

alberth wrote: post #111
muglug wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a simple question that’s hard to answer. A slightly different question that’s a bit easier to answer: “if I could wave a magic wand and X million lines of code were instantly rewritten and all developers were instantly trained on that language”. There the choice would be limited to languages that have similar or faster perf characteristics to Hack, without sacrificing developer productivity. Rust is out of the…

I like your question way better than mine :) Some follow-up … A. isn’t PHP on par perf wise to Hack these days? Re: “PHP is too slow” comment. B. have you ever looked into PHP-NGX? It’s perf looks impressive, though you lose the benefit of stateless https://github.com/rryqszq4/ngx-php https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

PHP served by an nginx (never saw the abbreviation NGX to be honest) server is standard procedure in PHP land.

Other alternatives are Apache, Caddy, and more…

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#232

Post by dikei »

DandyDev wrote: post #228
asankama wrote: post #214

Delighted to be part of this conversation on cell-based architecture. As the author of the cell-based reference architecture https://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture/blob/master/r... , I'm here to share insights on this exciting approach. Cell-based architecture introduces modular 'cells' into software systems, each with distinct APIs. This design fosters loose coupling and scalability – key for today's dynamic…

This seems written by AI? And as such it comes across as not genuine

It's from WSO2, a company selling enterprise middleware. Of course, the paper would read like something you bring to a sales meeting, not a tech talk.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#233

Post by PoignardAzur »

heywhatupboys wrote: post #10

Is Slack dead? unironically. Does it have a future? With Teams, etc. coming out, it seems most companies do not want to go the Slack route

One day Zulip will take over everything. Probably the same year Ubuntu beats Windows as the majority desktop OS.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#234

Post by csomar »

memefrog wrote: post #157
fulladder wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used Slack in a long time, but isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products? The founders got a nice exit several years back, I doubt they stuck around at Salesforce for long, so it's natural that the product would deteriorate over time. Slack IRC bridging in the 2014/2015 era was great. We had a lot of people who spent their whole workday in a terminal window and…

>isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products? No! Stop diluting this word.

enshittification of the word enshittification?

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#235

Post by nijave »

jeremyjh wrote: post #198
AugustoCAS wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you were using AWS? I know some of the AZ of other cloud providers (Azure? Oracle? Google?) are not fully siloed. They might have independent power and networking, but be in the same physical location. I'm mentioning this for other people to be aware as one can easily make the assumption that an AZ is the same concept on all clouds, which is not true and painful to realise.

Actually I assumed AWS did it the same way as the others - I thought maybe they are in another building on a campus but I didn’t think that should be a factor in planning and that I should use regions for geographic redundancy anyway.

Afaik AWS AZs are physically separate. I think some maps exist. Around here, there's 3 AZs and they're multi building campuses about 10-20 miles apart situated in suburbs outside the city freeway belt.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#236

Post by nijave »

danielovichdk wrote: post #53

"A single Slack API request from a user (for example, loading messages in a channel) may fan out into hundreds of RPCs to service backends, each of which must complete to return a correct response to the user." Not being a dick here but is this not a fairly obvious flaw? I mean why not keep a structured "message log" of all channels of all time ? For every write the system updates the message log. I am guessing and m…

Also version history (edits), threads, and links to content in other channels (sharing a message).

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#237

Post by vorpalhex »

lordgrenville wrote: post #227
memefrog wrote: post #158

"For example slack is an incredibly successful product. But it seems like every week I encounter a new bug that makes it completely unusable for me, from taking seconds per character when typing to being completely unable to render messages. (Discord on the other hand has always been reliable and snappy despite, judging by my highly scientific googling, having 1/3rd as many employees. So it's not like chat apps are j…

I really wouldn't judge the quality of some company's technical advice based on one person's experience with their UI. For almost any consumer software that gets mentioned here, you will find some people who love it and lots of others with gripes. And for e.g. Slack might have bad product/UI people but very good infra people. Better to look at TFA and judge it on its merits.

The proof is in the pudding, not the recipe blog post.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#238

Post by zo1 »

grokys wrote: post #153
zo1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I choose Slack for my employees when Teams integrates so nicely with everything else in the "stack". Teams is leaps and bounds ahead already, and Slack really lost the boat many years ago. Speaking of which, I'm going now to buy more Microsoft shares.

Maybe because you value your employees being able to copy an image from your chat platform? (Teams still can't copy images, instead you get a massive base64 block of text iirc)

I don't like that either, but I get it, it breaks the privacy of the sent message as messages have permissions attached to them.

Honestly, bugged me a few times before I just switched to using the snippet tool. I use it all the time anyways and this felt natural.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#239

Post by HumanOstrich »

asankama wrote: post #214

Delighted to be part of this conversation on cell-based architecture. As the author of the cell-based reference architecture https://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture/blob/master/r... , I'm here to share insights on this exciting approach. Cell-based architecture introduces modular 'cells' into software systems, each with distinct APIs. This design fosters loose coupling and scalability – key for today's dynamic…

I'm familiar with the cell architecture promoted by the WSO2 papers (and other resources). I like it and I've used it in client projects.

However, this article uses "cell" in a completely different way. It is not the cell-based architecture that you are promoting here without reading the article.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#240

Post by gibb0n »

Seems to be the same collection of services deployed in different AZs with a load balancer? The trick would be how data is replicated across the instances, which I'm guessing is some sort of event publishing or even backup sources of truth? It says that will come in the next article and surely that's the more interesting part than the load balancing...

Also explains to me why new features would take a while to roll out of you are cautiously updating instances/AZs one by one

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